Cecilia Kang

That's exactly right, Rachel.

What the lawyers in these cases and the plaintiffs are trying to do is to get around that legal shield that the social media companies have been able to use to protect themselves in court.

And they're saying, no, this is actually not about speech at all.

This is about you companies creating and engineering technologies to be harmful and that those are violations of state and federal consumer laws.

So this year, we will see two big batches of trials begin in all of these cases that have been filed.

And the first batch that takes place in Los Angeles...

include nine plaintiffs, nine trials, separate trials by these different plaintiffs.

They're all individuals, all claiming that when they were young, when they were minors, they became addicted to social media and they suffered these harms.

And these nine cases, they're known as bellwethers because they've been picked out of thousands of lawsuits filed by individuals against the social media companies.

And they're seen as very representative of the many different charges and experiences that individuals have had and suffered, as they claim, by becoming addicted to these social media companies.

Right.

So the first case and trial that begins is of a individual who goes by the initials KGM.

She is a now 20-year-old from Chico, California.

And she has said that she created her first social media account on YouTube at the age of eight.

She then joined Instagram at the age of nine and Musical.ly, which is now known as TikTok, at the age of 10 and Snapchat at 11.

So she's been using all the social media platforms for a long time.

And her mom said that she had no idea that these platforms could be dangerous and could become so addictive to her child.

And she only figured that out after watching a news program where she learned about the potential harms of social media.

Her mom said that if she had known how potentially harmful these sites were, she would have prevented her daughter from perhaps even having a phone and using the apps.

And what KGM, the plaintiff, is arguing is that the social media platforms were incredibly alluring to her and that she got hooked.